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I was reading through some old threads in a chat group I used to be active in the other day when I encountered the startling news that "Jerry Bowles has built an 'empire' of aggregation sites..." (around the WordFrame platform). I was even more taken aback by a subsequent comment from another chap, to wit: "Jerry has built an empire of sand from ripping people's stuff - no-one who contribs gets a dime except Jerry's outfit that goes the web 1.0 model..."
Now, the same things could be said of most of the content-focused "collaborative" aggregation sites like Daily Kos, MarketingProfs, Trading Goddess, SeekingAlpha, and so on. As far as I know, none of them pay for volunteer blogger content either so obviously they are ripping bloggers off, too.
Or are they?
Before we get to that, I need to address a couple of points of fact. One is that Jerry's "empire" is mostly not Jerry's. I have a younger, prettier, smarter partner named Robin Carey who does most of the heavy lifting and all of the business stuff and is the majority stakeholder. Our technology guy Mark Lazen also has a piece. Two, our "empire" is a promising but still struggling startup business that is by no means out of the woods. Three, all our sites are "open invite" which means that anyone is welcome to add a blog to our content flow. We don't promise to use it but it is strictly a volunteer initiative. No guns or threats of violence are involved. We sometimes invite a few bloggers to get a new site going but after that the growth is organic and voluntary. Four, collaborative content-focused websites like ours are not Web 1.0, they're Web 3.0.
The reason is simple. Most bloggers are more interested in promoting themselves and their real businesses than in becoming full-time bloggers. Only a handful of people actually make money from blogging and most pajama pundits are lucky to get a couple of hundred viewers a day to their standalone sites. Many of these neglected bloggers are very, very good and deserve a wider audience. Having a post appear on one of the more trafficked collaborative blogs like Social Media Today can expose a blogger to a larger audience, provide recognition for a lot of hard work, lead to some nice speaking or blogging or consulting invitations, and even increase traffic to the original source. That is considerably more appealing to most people, I suspect, than the 25 cents or so per post that we could afford to pay if we split our mostly imaginary profits with bloggers.
Here's an example of the power of aggregation. A couple of weeks ago, I
picked up from our moderation queue and made choice of the day a post by an Australian blogger named Tiphereth Gloria called How Not to Use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study. As of this moment, that post has been read 32816 times, has 43 comments and has been retweeted 763 times. A follow up post by Tiphereth with a response from HabitatUK was read by 7317 people and retweeted 84 times. I'm guessing here but I suspect that those numbers represent a high water mark in our Aussie friend's blogging career. Not all our "discoveries" are that spectacular, of course, but it happens frequently enough that we know we're more the model of the future, not the past.
As I said in response to my critical friend who started this conversation: Do I feel bad about ripping off poor Tiphereth? You bet your ass, I don't.